That morning they’d appeared from nowhere, and they threw themselves on Nagorno, submerging half his body in the river. I was taking care of my aloe plants several yards downstream, almost hidden behind the plants. The sounds of the boy’s fight to free himself of the other two caught my attention, and I cautiously observed the scene. However, when I sensed that he had been underwater too long without a breath, and the young men’s intentions were more serious than in the past, I ran upstream to help him. Before I got there, Nagorno had already rid himself of his hemp jacket and had managed to get free. Half-naked and furious, he confronted the two brothers.
“Leave me in peace,” the boy shrieked. “My father will punish you as soon as he returns.”
“Your father, bastard?” they laughed. “Ask this slave about your father.”
“Why should I do that?” Nagorno asked, bewildered.
“Kelermes has long forgotten the path to your mother’s tent. The brother of this slave, on the other hand, knows it all too well.”
“That’s a lie! I’m the firstborn son of Kelermes, and you’re going to pay dearly for what you’ve said.”
But the young men had already run off, leaving me standing beside a bruised boy who was beside himself.
“Move, slave,” he whispered without looking at me, removing my outstretched hand of assistance with a swipe of his own hand.
“Yes, master,” I replied. I turned and went back to what I’d been doing.
I’d never been so near to the boy before, and I couldn’t avoid noticing the bruises that covered his back.
That same day Olbia summoned me. She’d hurt the sole of her foot on a thorn as she was dismounting from her horse, so I went for some aloe and began to treat her foot in silence. Nagorno arrived when I had almost finished, soaking wet and still upset.
“Mother, they’re going around telling lies about you.”
“Who?”
“Araxes and Aristeas, the sons of Sirgis. They’re saying that Kelermes isn’t my father, that it’s one of the Hellenic slaves. I’m only going to ask you once: Am I the son of a slave?”
Olbia had remained seated while I was adjusting her footwear, but she straightened her back and stood up, and I could see her face had gone so red that her features had become deformed. I swallowed and waited for her reaction, my body tense. She grabbed the boy by the neck with one hand and lifted him off the ground, preventing him from breathing.
“How dare you ask me such a question? You’re the son of Kelermes, and you’ve been named to succeed him. As of now your jewelry making is over. I’ll train you myself day and night until you are a worthy leader whom everyone respects. I’ve been very lax with you, but that’s going to end.”
She let the young boy drop, while I remained with my eyes glued to the ground, kneeling between mother and son. Nagorno coughed until he’d recovered his breath and then clenched his jaw. As of that moment his voice would forever be hoarse and monotonous, and his facial expression lost some of its humanity.
“As you wish, Mother. But let him die, then.”
“Who?”
“The Hellenic slave. If he means nothing to you, let me kill him myself. And his brother, too, this one with the strange eyes,” he said, giving me a kick in the ribs. “I don’t like the way he looks at me.”
I heard the sentence without raising my head from the ground or moving from my forced posture, but I used my eyes to look for any object that might serve me to kill that child and his mother then and there. I came up with a hundred ways to finish them off, warn my father before their bodies were discovered, and try to flee before anyone raised the alarm . . . It would be difficult, virtually impossible, but better to attempt it than to die right there, prostrate in front of them.
“The slave isn’t going to die,” whispered Olbia. “More than that, anyone who hurts the slave will die at my hands, and that includes you. Do you understand? And his brother will live as long as he continues to heal us satisfactorily. Now return to your tent. We ride in the morning.”
Nagorno was silent for a few seconds. And then he answered, “Yes, Mother,” and disappeared without a sound.
The next day Ponticus’s murmuring woke me at dawn.
“It’s incredible how you can sleep. Haven’t you heard the comings and goings during the night?”
“No,” I said, stretching. “What’s happened?”
“Nagorno took his mother two gold-plated skulls,” he replied. “They belonged to the sons of Sirgis. Mayátide, her head servant, told me. The boy said they were two worthy enemies, and that he’s now ready for his battle initiation.”
I looked at him, half-asleep, trying to come to terms with what he was telling me, but I kept quiet because I sensed he wasn’t done yet.
“There’s something else. You should go and check out your aloe plantation.”
I jumped up and ran naked to the edge of the river, where I was cultivating all the aloe plants for the following year. Someone had ridden his horse over all of them, trampling them, and then pulled them up by the roots. I found Hektor there trying to save all the plants he could. I didn’t say anything to him; I was feeling such a rage that I was incapable of articulating a single word. I hastened to gather all the leaves I could and extract the pulp so they wouldn’t dry out.
I could see Nagorno and Olbia on horseback in the distance, riding toward the open steppes. Despite the desperation I felt at that moment, my worst days in Scythia were yet to come.
Not long after this, Nagorno went to the Borystene slave market and returned with an escort of three Sarmatian slaves. They were mercenaries who had lost their freedom because of their crimes. The three were tall and massive, like trees that were centuries old, and for the first time in my life I had to look up to address someone. From their first night in the camp, they were never separated from Nagorno, they never mixed with the other slaves, and I would never forget their sadistic faces.
54
ADRIANA
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
I came across him sitting on the landing of the staircase in my building. His head with its crew cut was buried in his arms in such a pitiful position that I knew that his entire world had exploded in the same way as on that faraway day when he had come to tell me that everything had changed in mine.
Irreversibly.
That was the word.
My cousin got up, startled, when I hit the light switch, as if he’d been dragged out of another reality. He was holding a small piece of paper in his hand. I glanced at it to try and get some idea of what it was, and I was able to decipher the letterhead of an expensive hotel and the elegant writing that several hours earlier had made a mockery of my few graphology skills.
“Take it,” he said, sticking the note a few inches from my face. “I’ve come to bring you a message.”
In fact, he wasn’t talking. His words were erupting with fury like the lava and stones when a volcano explodes. For once I overcame my curiosity and swept aside the paper with my hand without even reading it. I took my keys out of my pocket and opened the door to my apartment.
“Hey, come inside. I have no intention of allowing you to stage a scandal on the stairs.” The good mood I’d been in after my walk in the beech forest had disappeared. Not a trace of it remained. And there was no way the day was going to improve.
“I don’t intend to move from here,” he said as if he were the same stubborn boy of thirty years ago. “And you’re going to listen—”
I closed the door in his face and went to the bedroom to get rid of my bag. Then, without hurrying, I came back down the passage and opened the front door for him.
“Are you in a state to talk now?” I asked him, my arms crossed.
Marcos snorted by way of reply but eventually came into my apartment. He held out the wretched piece of paper for me again, although without gesticula
ting quite so much this time.
“Are you going to explain to me once and for all what this message was doing on top of my wife’s handcuffed body?”
I grabbed the small note from his hands and read.
Adriana, you see how simple it’s been to warp a life?
Show-off, I thought.
I looked up and confronted the lost look in my cousin’s eyes. Marcos, who never cared deeply about anything, who spent his life skating over the surface of events. He looked aged and diminished. He was asking me for explanations because, for once, nothing was making sense in his world.
Welcome to TAF, cousin.
I took him by the hand and dragged him into the kitchen. I was dying of hunger. I took a couple of loin fillets out of the freezer. A sacrilege in Iago’s eyes, I assumed, although I then smiled as it occurred to me that in Monte Castillo, they would have surrounded the leftover meat with ice, too. In any event, I promised myself that I’d add “Did you use ice to keep meat fresh?” to the interminable list of questions that had already filled a notebook I’d bought for that purpose.
Marcos sat down in a kitchen chair, my mother’s chair, the one I never used, the one that had remained unoccupied since our last breakfast together. I didn’t tell him, although I would have kicked anyone else out of it.
“You’ll have to go first, Marcos, because I have no idea what’s happened.”
“What do you mean, you have no idea? Then why was there a—?”
“Start, will you,” I interrupted him. “If we keep going like this, we’ll never get anywhere.”
“All right,” he said, giving in. “Early this morning I was in the veterinary clinic. I’d just got back from the Monreal Fair, but I hadn’t been home yet. I had a backlog of paperwork, as is usually the case when I’m away for a few days, so I called Elisa to tell her not to wait for me with breakfast. But when I dialed the home number, I got the answering machine, so I called her cell phone and a man’s voice answered it. He was talking in an odd way, as if he were whispering. He said something like, ‘You can come and pick up your wife from the Hotel Real. Room 333,’ and then hung up.
“I was really disturbed so I called back, but he didn’t answer again. To be honest, a thousand things flooded into my mind. I didn’t know if I should call the police or what I should do. I grabbed my car and drove straight to the Hotel Real. I swear I couldn’t make any sense out of what was happening. It was like that Hitchcock film—you know, the one with the ordinary guy who gets caught up in a story that has nothing to do with him, and then it’s all gunshots and spies and being chased by planes.”
“North by Northwest,” I said. When he started to go off on a tangent, it was hard to get him back on track. “Go on.”
“So I went past the hotel reception and up to the third floor. I walked into the room, because the door was slightly ajar despite the fact that there was a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the outside door handle.” He ran his fingers over his crew cut and stared fixedly at the white floor tiles in front of him. “I found Elisa lying on the bed wearing underwear I’d never seen in my life. She was handcuffed to the bars on the headboard.” He looked up and asked me, “Did you know that the beds in the Real have bars?”
He didn’t wait for my reply. “She had a note on her thigh, and the keys to the handcuffs were on the bedside table, in plain sight.”
Jairo, always so theatrical, I thought.
“At first I thought he had done it to her against her will, so I picked up the hotel phone to call the police as soon as I’d checked she wasn’t hurt, but Elisa stopped me. She’d been crying and shivering for some time, and her eye makeup was smeared all over her face.
“Elisa told me everything,” he went on like an automaton. “That she’d arranged to meet one of her bosses from the museum, that they’d been together at the hotel, and that he’d left her tied to the bed and answered my call on her phone. I had to order a lime blossom tea from room service because she couldn’t stop shaking. I think I wasn’t angry with her at first because the fright she’d had was so huge, but when we got home I began to realize what had really happened.”
I sat down in the chair beside him and put my arm around his shoulder, knowing that the consolation I was offering him was minimal.
“We spent the early hours of the morning shouting at each other, and we haven’t clarified anything. The only thing I know is that I don’t want to see her again. I walked out.”
“Where did you go?”
“To my parents’ place. It’s not too far from the clinic.”
“And the kids?”
“That’s for a judge to decide.”
“You’ve really decided to separate? Right now it’s all very fresh, but you must think through all the consequences,” I told him in a low voice. I don’t know why.
“She’s the one who didn’t think about the consequences,” he muttered under his breath.
“She didn’t think you’d find out.”
“Which leads me to ask you what the devil you had to do with all this, and why this character sent you a message via my wife. What sort of trouble are the two of you mixed up in?”
I sighed. If you only knew.
“Yesterday I caught Elisa making arrangements with him over the phone. I had no idea there’d been any fooling around between them before. I asked her for an explanation, but Elisa reacted rather badly.”
I was going to tell him I tried to persuade her against it by telling her about Jairo’s misdemeanors, but I realized that one question would lead to another, and we’d reach that moment when I’d have to say, “I can’t tell you any more,” and Marcos would just get angry again. So I said nothing, waiting for the shower of questions from my cousin.
“And that’s all you did? You didn’t think to call me?” he snapped at me in amazement.
“I did call you, Marcos, several times, even when I had no idea what to say to you. But you had your phone switched off all night until I went to bed. Didn’t you see my missed calls?”
“I saw them this morning when I switched on my phone, but with everything that happened, I forgot to call you back. I was out partying with some colleagues last night,” he said apologetically, “but you could have left a message on voice mail, couldn’t you?”
“And what did you want me to say? That it was highly likely that your wife was going to be cheating on you last night? You told me not to meddle in your affairs.”
“In that situation, yes, of course you should! For heaven’s sake, Dana! That’s what one expects from one’s soul cousin.”
Your soul cousin has been on the verge of losing her life because of your family twice in the past seventy-two hours.
The truth was burning my mouth, and I closed my lips tightly so it wouldn’t come out. Involving my cousin in this matter would mean putting him in danger. He would unwittingly tell Elisa, and Elisa would act like a loudspeaker. I couldn’t say anything. For the sake of Iago and his family, and for Marcos’s own safety, because he’d confront Jairo without having any idea what he was really risking.
“Marcos, I assure you I did everything I could to try to dissuade her, but in any case, the final decision was hers. I couldn’t interfere any more than I have already.”
“Bullshit!” he shouted. “Excuses! I’d have done it for you, or have you forgotten already?”
No, Marcos, don’t go there, I begged him without managing to say it out loud.
Just then my doorbell rang. I jumped up and looked at the time. I’d missed my meeting with Iago.
“Stay here, please. I’ll be right back.”
And I went out into the passage, turning on the lights to brighten the night that had seeped in through the windows. I looked through the little peephole and opened the door for Iago. I planned to explain to him that my cousin was in the kitchen in a fairly agitated state and that maybe it wa
sn’t the best moment for introductions, but Marcos hadn’t paid any heed to my request to stay put, as was his style, and he suddenly appeared right behind me, arms crossed at the sight of Iago.
Iago picked up from my expression that something wasn’t right, and I noticed a certain alertness in his eyes. My cousin came forward, hand outstretched, to introduce himself, but when he heard me say “Iago del Castillo,” he went as red as a beetroot and threw himself at Iago, pushing him against the wall of the landing. Iago stepped aside just in time and grabbed his arm, twisting it behind his back, and forcing Marcos face-first into the wall.
Iago turned toward me with a questioning look. “Can you explain this to me, Adriana?”
“Meet my cousin, Marcos, Elisa’s husband. He’s quite angry with Jairo.”
“I was afraid of that,” he murmured.
Then he addressed my cousin. “You’ve actually confused me with my brother.”
“He’s not the one who slept with my wife?” asked Marcos, his cheek still squashed against the wall.
“He was in Copenhagen last night, so I don’t think so,” I answered Marcos.
Iago rolled his eyes at my intervention and released my cousin. Marcos rather ostentatiously brushed down his plaid shirt, which had been left almost white from the whitewashed wall.
“And what’s he doing in your house at this hour?” he asked me.
“Good God, Marcos. I have no intention of giving you any explanations.”
“Well, I think you owe me more than one, because as far as I can see, you’re all having affairs in that museum, and you still haven’t explained to me why the guy who had the rendezvous with my wife is sending you little messages.”
“That’s enough. You should go.”
The Immortal Collection (A Saga of the Ancient Family Book 1) Page 40
